How salespeople can leverage social media to boost sales performance
01/11/2023
In an increasingly competitive sales environment, salespeople must be abreast of advancing technology, especially in our digitalized world. Professor Deva Rangarajan explains how incorporating social media into every salesperson’s tool kit and using it in the right ways can be integral to success.
Based on an interview with Professor Deva Rangarajan on his paper “The impact of business-to-business salespeople’s social media use on value co-creation and cross/up-selling: the role of social capital,” co-written with Professors Omar S. Itani and Vishag Badrinarayanan, published in European Journal of Marketing, September 15, 2022.
Digital technologies, especially the now-ubiquitous social media, have altered the sales landscape forever. It’s flagrant with celebrities leveraging their Instagram or Twitter accounts to advertise to their millions of followers, but the process is less obvious in the business-to-business domain. “When Kim Kardashian says, ‘buy this product,’ people will buy it, but with B2B it is not so clear,” comments Professor Rangarajan, who devoted a recent study to B2B sales and social media. Indeed, telling a story in just a few characters in a LinkedIn or Twitter post is unlikely to win a client over.
